Ukraine: Population, Water

The Wichita bureau points me to a couple of Ukraine facts I haven't seen elsewhere. One, population is on the skids--down from about 52 million in the early 90s to under 46 million today. General mortality statistics look similar to Russia's with, notably, that absurd gap between males and females over 65--M/F ratio in Russia, 46 percent, Ukraine, 51 percent.  Just eyeballing the chart, it looks to me like the Russian population may be falling faster than the rest--or at any rate, the areas of smallest decline (or absolute increase) are all in the far west.

Sources: here and here.

Item #2, it is suggested that the Crimea might be in water deficit. This sounds plausible but a desultory Google search doesn't turn up anything particularly helpful: this is really the best I could do, and I  note that it is a few years old.  I gather that Crimea gets its electricity from the mainland--any risk that somebody just pulls the plug?

The Shostakovich Nose: An Assignment

There's a live/HD performance coming up Saturday of "The Nose" by Dmitri Shostakovich in the William Kentridge staging which opened at the Met in 2010.  So here's some homework.  No, not the Gogol story, silly--which you have already read and fully assimilated.  Rather, take a swing at something by Andrey Platonov, perhaps particularly Happy Moscow, which I mentioned briefly the other day (cf. link, link)  and which captures better than anything I know the mood of anxious and giddy expectancy that seems to have swept (urban) Russia in the 30s--that is, before the Great Purge of the later 30s which did so much to define the Stalinist experience in our memory.  

We know that Shostakovich embarked on his career in a mood of high optimism; we know that Stalin didn't cotton to his operatic writing (he was probably baffled and disturbed by it all).  We know that Shostakovich, unlike so many of his contemporaries, survived the turmoil that devoured so many of his contemporaries, and that he went on to become a Soviet icon.  In his introduction to the new NYRB edition Happy Moscow, Robert Chandler says:

A conventional view of Russian history sees the 1917 Revolution as a movement of Utopian  promise and the mid-1930s as a time of fear-shackled, conventional thinking in every area of life.  In many respects, however, it was the other way around.  For several years from 1917 the Bolsheviks were trying simply to cling to power, most people were trying simply to survive, and only a tiny--though vocal--artistic avant-garde was proposing Utopian plans for the restructuring of both the world and the human psyche.  By the middle 1930s, however, it was the State itself that was claiming to make Utopian dreams into a reality.

 Chandler also retells a wonderful anecdote from Wolfgang Leonhard, the German  historian, about emigrating to Moscow in 1935 with his German communist mother.  He reports that they couldn't get any adequate maps.  The only ones they found showed what the city was like before 1914, and what it would be like in the future.  

Afterthought:  And you know, now that I think of it, I remember one other item that captures the same spirit of Moscow in the 30s. That would be the early chapters of Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, of which I wrote here.  Read 'em all, and in any event, enjoy the opera.  

"Story of a Little Girl With No Father or Mother About a Cow"

There are few cows, since they get eaten.  A cow has legs at its four corners.  Beef patties are made from a cow, everybody gets one patty, but potatoes grow separately.  A cow gives milk herself; other animals try, but can't.  It's a pity they can't, it would be better if they could.  The girls are full of meat patty; they've gone to bed by themselves and they smell.  I'm bored.

--Andrey Platonov in a draft for Happy Moscow, reprinted in a footnote to the New York Review of  Books edition of the novel, "translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and others," at 234-5.

"...not like a Christian at all."

Alexander Herzen cherished warm memories of "old Filvmonov," his jailer at the Krutinsky  Monastery, converted into a police barracks--"a simple creature," Herzen recalls, "kind-hearted himself and grateful for any kindness that was shown him, and it is likely that not much had been shown him in the course of his life."  Old Filmonov liked to tell stories of his past.

He served in Moldovia, in the Turkish campaign of 1805; and the commander of his company was the kindest of men, caring like a father for each soldier and always foremost in battle.  'Our captain was in love with a Moldavian woman, and we saw he was in bad spirits; the reason was that she was often visiting another officer.  One day he sent for me and a friend of mine--a fine soldier he was and lost both legs in battle afterwards--and said to us that the woman had jilted him; and he asked if we were willing to help him and teach her a lesson.  "Surely, Your Honor," said we; "we are at your service at any time."  He thanked us and pointed out the house where the officer lived.  Then he said, "Take your stand tonight on the bridge which she must cross to get to his house; catch hold of her quietly, and into the river with her!" "Very good, Your Honor," said we.   So I and my chum got hold of a sack and went to the bridge; there we sat, and near midnight, the girl came running past.  "What are you hurrying for?" we asked.  Then we gave her one over the head and; not a sound did she make, bless her; we put her in the sack and threw it into the river.  Next day our captain went to the other officer and said: "You must not be angry with the girl: we detained her; in fact, she is  now at the bottom of the river.  But I am quite prepared to take a little walk with you, with swords or pistols, as you prefer."  Well, they fought, and our captain was badly wounded in the chest; he wasted away, poor fellow, and after three months gave back his soul to God.

'But was the woman really drowned?'  I asked.

'Oh yes, Sir,'  said the soldier.

I was horrified by the childlike indifference with which the old man told me this story.  He appeared to guess my feelings or to give a thought for the first time to his victim; for he added, to reassure me and make it up with his own conscience:

'You know, Sir, she was only a benighted heathen, not like a Christian at all.'

--So Alexander Herzen, Childhood, Youth and Exile (OUP Paperback 1980).   Russians have long experienced a, shall we say challenging, relationship with the Muslim people on their southern border.

Vadim Alive and Dead

Vadim married Herzen's cousin Tatyana.  He went to Kharkov on the promise of s professor's chair, "but his name had come to the ears of the police, and the University refused to appoint him."  Vadim has no other income.  "Black want began for him....suffering from contact with rough manners and hard hearts."  His wife Tatyana picks up the story:

 One day we had spent all our money to the last penny ... . I had tried to borrow ten roubles the day before, but I failed, because I had borrowed already in every possible quarter.  The shops refused to give us any further credit, and our one thought was--what will the children get to eat tomorrow?  Vadim sat in sorrow near the window; then he got up, took his hat, and said he meant to take as walk.  I saw that he was very low, and I felt frightened; and yet I was glad that he should have something to divert his thoughts.  When he went out, I threw myself upon the bed and wept bitter tears, and then I  began to think what was to be done.  Everything of any value, rings and spoons, had been pawned long ago.  I could see no resources but one--to go to our relations and beg their cold charity, their bitter alms.  Meanwhile Vadim was walking aimlessly about the streets till he cme to the Petrovsky Boulevard.  As he passed a bookseller's shop there, it occurred to him to ask whether a single copy of his book had been sold.  Five days earlier he had enquired, with no result; and he was full of apprehension when he entered the shop.  "Very glad to see you," said the man; "I have heard from my Petersburg agent tht he has sold 300 roubles' worth of your books.  Would you like payment now?"  And the man there and then counted out fifteen gold pieces.  Vadim's joy was so great that he was bewildered.  He hurried to the nearest eating-house, bought food,  fruit, and a bottle of wine, hired a cab, and drove home in triumph.   I was adding water to some remnants of soup to feed my children, and I meant to give him a little, pretending that I had eaten some already; and then suddenly he came in, carrying his parcel and the bottle of wine, and looking as happy and cheerful as in times past.

 Vadim lived on; he kept his old convictions, "but he kept them like a warrior, feeling that he is mortally wounded, still grasps his sword."  In time consumption overtook Vadim.  The abbot of a monastery, once a furious dissenter but now Orthodox, arranges that he be buried within the convent walls.

Source:  Alexander Herzen, Childhood, Youth and Exile 115-6 (Oxford World's Classics Paperback, 1980). 

Russia as Postmodernist Theatre

Meet the New Dictatorship, not quite like the Old Dictatorship:

In contemporary Russia, unlike the old USSR or present-day North Korea, the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away. [Vladislav] Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It’s a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable.

Link.   So Peter Pomerantsev on the power behind the Putin throne.  The headline says "Putin's Rasputin," though I suspect Pomerantsev might not have fancied the choice of labels. By all accounts Rasputin was an authentic nutter who held a gullible Tsarina in thrall.   Surkov--and Putin, and the other one--may actually know what they are doing.  So much the worse for Russia.

You Talkin' Scholarship? I'll Show You Scholarship!

Rachel Polonsky introduces us to Nikolai Fyodorov, onetime keeper of he Russian State Library: 

... Fyodorov, known as the ‘Russian Socrates’, was reputed to be familiar with the contents of all the books in its collections. In one story about the reach of the librarian’s encyclopedic knowledge, a group of engineers  on the Trans-Siberian Railway came to show him maps of the projected route across the steppe, and Fyodorov, who had never been to Siberia, corrected their calculation of the altitude of some of the hills.  Fyodorov believed, quite literally, that books were animate beings, because they expressed the thought, the souls, of their authors. At the heart of his library work and his philosophical writings (which were published posthumously in 1903 as The Philosophy of the Common Task) was a refusal to be reconciled with the fact of death. Man’s task on earth was the material resurrection of the dead (‘not as crazy as it sounds’, Lev Tolstoy remarked), who were present, unconstituted in the library dust, souls waiting in books for the systematic returning of past generations to life. (‘There was no man on earth who felt such sorrow at the death of people,’ Berdyaev said.)  ... 

Fyodorov was a pioneer in the practice of librarianship. He believed that the keeping of books was sacred work. A library catalogue, he thought, should be arranged by the authors’ dates of death, like a calendar of saints’ days. The book, he believed, is the most exalted among remains of the past, for it represents that past at its most human, the past as thought. For him, only the struggle against the common enemy death, the task of resurrecting the ‘fathers’, would unify mankind. ‘To study’, for Fyodorov, meant ‘not to reproach and not to praise, but to restore life’.

--Polonsky, Rachel (2011-01-11). Molotov's Magic Lantern: Travels in Russian History 

(Kindle Locations 201-221). Macmillan. Kindle Edition. 

But He's Still Dead

Somehow I missed it: Dec. 29* was the 94th anniversary of the assassination of Rasputin:

I went shootin' with Rasputin
Ate farina with Czarina
Blintzes with the Princes and the Czar
RAH RAH RAH

*N.S.  O.S., Dec. 16.

Is Mikhail Khodorkovsky an "Entrepreneur?"

Chris Blattman* showcases a fascinating find: a statement in his own defense by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in Russia, later the railroaded victim of the Putin machine.   Perhaps there is nothing strictly new here except the source; still, it is invigorating to read such a lucid denunciation of the corruption and general falsity of the current Russian regime from a man in a position to know.

My only lingering concern is--Khodorkovsky presumes to plead the case of "the entrepreneur."  But is Khodorkovsky an "entrepreneur?"  Certainly it is customary to call him that.   And you'd have to concede that he did things--thought of doing things--that others didn't try.  One way to identify an "entrepreneur":  when he makes his billions, do you look at his work and say "why didn't I think of that?"  Or worse: "I did think of that--why didn't I do it?"  There must be legions in the debris of the Soviet Union and look at Khodorkovsky and say that to themselves every day (tinctured, of course, by the reflection that he now faces very likely the rest of his life in prison).

Still, it seems to me that when you get down cases, you find that Khodorkovsky's primary skill was resource pillage: seeing through Soviet corruption and fraudulence early on and understanding--understanding what?  How to end it, and to lift the shackles from the millions who groaned under its injustice?  Or simply to deploy the corruption and fraudulence to his own ends?

That's  your question for the day.  Entries will be graded on originality and aptness of thought.

*Joe Nocera has  a full spread in the Saturday NYT.

Come One, Come All: Russian Industries on the Auction Block

I know I'm a few days late on this but I am still savoring the story about how the Russians are getting ready to sell off   some pieces of their state-owned industrial empire.   Coming from the king of all confiscators, I'd say this is a pretty good joke.   Can't anybody explain to this guy that one of the first requisites of a functioning market system is transactional security, and that if he's the kind of guy who will turn around and say "nyet, sorry, changed our mind, give it back,"--he can't expect to get paid in anything except maybe a bunch of funny little paper rubles?

Two Things I Learned Today: Russia

From disparate sources:

• One (from the notes to my edition of Dostoesvsky's The Idiot): Russians legalized dueling for the first time in 1894.

• Two (from Elif Batuman, The Possessed): Among items confiscated by Stalin's thugs when they arrested the writer Isaac Babel in 1938: "Duck for bath"--a rubber ducky?

Russian Internal Passports

Here's one that I hadn't focused on before: Russia still has internal passports. That is: you can't move from Palookaville to, say, St. Petersburg, unless you have the approval of some bureaucrat. I learn this because I read in the Moscow Times that President Prime Minister Putin wants to abolish liberalize these requirements.

A spasm of liberalism on the part of the famously authoritarian elected leader? Not quite. It turns out that some places in Russia have labor shortages. Putin has ordered bureaucrats to find some way to cut through the paperwork so Russians can go where the work is.

One person who would have been glad of such an opportunity is the 19th-Century social thinker Alexander Herzen. He writes about his own experience with the passport system (apparently in 1847):

The second day after my arrival in Petersburg the house porter came to ask me from the local police: "With what papers had I come to Petersburg?" The only paper I had, the decree concerning my retirement from the service, I had sent to the Governor-General with my request for a passport. I gave the house-porter my permit, but he came back to say that it was valid for leaving Moscow but not for entering Petersurg. A police-officer came too,with an invitation to the oberpolitsmeyster's office. I went to Kokoshkin's office, which was lit by lamps although it was daytime, and after an hour he arrived. Kokoshkin more than other persons of the same selection was the picture of a servant of the Tsar with no ulterior designs, a man in favour, ready to do any dirty job, a favourite with no conscience and no bent for reflection. He served and made his pile as naturally as birds sing. ...

--Alexander Herzen, Ends and Beginnings 207
(Oxford UP World's Classic ed. 1985)

What a shame he wasn't a citizen of a free country. Oh wait.

Lucas on ReSovietization of Russia

I'm still taking pleasure and profit from Edward Lucas' absorbing (if depressing) The New Russia (cf. link). I dabbled in Russia issues a bit in the decade of anarcho-capitalism around 1995 and I guess I hadn't really focused on how far Russia had retrenched into a phase of reSovietization (or should it be reTsarification, or are they the same?). Some numbers:

Since reform ground to an almost complete halt in 2003, the private sector has been eclipsed by the growth in the state's political and economic power. ...[T]he share of GDP created by private companies actually fell from 70 percent to 65 percent in 2006. .... Private ownership tends to bring more efficient management. .... Since the attack on the oil company Yukos, modernization has almost halted; annual growth in oil extraction has fallen from 13 percent to 2 percent. State-run giants like Rosnfelt spend their money on more interesting things: politics and acquisitions. ... Stealth renationalization has been one of the sharpest economic trends in Putin's second term. In 2004 the state controlled 11 percent of the voting shares in Russia's 20 largest companies; it now controls 39 percent. ....In 1999 In 2000, 1,200 companies produced 80 percent of Russian GDP. In 2006 fewer than 500 companies were producing that share. In America, 60 percent of GDP comes from smazll and medium-sized businesses. In Japan, 74 percent does. In Russia, the figure is only 17 percent.

Luce, 90-2. This is great, although we may wonder exactly how to relate these numbers with the evidence that per capita income in Russia has grown by a factor of perhaps six since the Yeltsin years (surely a dominant reason why Putin remains big-nation leader most popular with the home folks). A large part of the story surely can be found in the great river of resource wealth that flowed into Russia during the early 2000s, yet we know that resource wealth often does not transfer into per capita wealth.

Perhaps even more important: what does the growth in state-sponsored inefficiency augur for the future? Surely Russia cannot expect to remain strong if Soviet-style ownership generates Soviet-style exhaustion. Surely indeed. But then, the Soviet government (as, come to think of it, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman and countless others before it) was inefficient for a long time before it finally collapsed.

Afterthought--what I really meant was: Seems to me that what I am writing about here is "the ReBrezhnevikation of Russiaz."

Service's Five Books

Well, here's a surprise. I'm accustomed (aren't you?) to reading lists of must-read books with a guilty awareness that I have read none of them. But Robert Service, the historian of modern Russia, puts together a list of five books, and I'd have to say that three, maybe four, of the five are real favorites--not just books I've read, but books that I like a lot. Top of the list would be Thucydides, Pelopennesian War--not (of course) a book about Russia, but the one must-read classic history. A second is Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. The third is a not-so-obvious choice, but I loved it: Leon Trotsky's My Life. I think Service is bang on about author and subject:

It’s a wonderful memoir of a childhood and young adulthood. Trotsky is a wonderful writer. I think he is one of the two great political writers of the 20th century, the other being Winston Churchill. But, as you move through the book, you get a very strong sense of a man who is justifying his own politics and his own career choices. He gets less and less attractive and less and less plausible as the first half of the book gives way to the second half. In that sense it was a very influential work for me because I started thinking that he was a very attractive man and I ended up thinking that he was a very unattractive politician whose self-justification for the terror and the dictatorship and the ultra centralist discipline that he imposed didn’t have much merit.

The fourth item is George Orwell, 1984, and how can one argue with 1984? But if I were to go back to Orwell today, I think I might take down Homage to Catalonia or The Road to Wigan Pier, or maybe Down and Out in Paris and London, where he talks about how they would spit on the steak to make it juicy. Or maybe best, just browse through the four-volume Penguin set of the Orwell journalism.

The fifth item is only a name to me: Alexander Blok, The Twelve. Service again:

I remember that when I read this as a student of Russian literature it went really deep. When I later came to study the revolution itself, the politics and the economics and the sociology of the revolution – time and again I could hear in my mental ear the rhythms of this poem. It’s one of the great literary achievements.

Reason enough to go seek it out. I just hope that to enjoy it, you don't have to read it in Russian. I can order beer, but the great poets are beyond me.

Service himself is of course a first-clas historian: not flashy but steady and clear-sighted. Here's a sort of bibliography (of which I make no pretense to have read more than a few). I thought Experiment with a People was one of the first really good books about Russia post Gorbachev. Give what he said about Trotsky, I think I'll have to take a look at his Trotsky: a Biography too (what, no Kindle?).

Yegor Gaidar, 1956-2009

A brief personal anecdote: I did one consulting gig in Russia, back in 1995 during the rush to privatization. My brief was bankruptcy law. I remember how, tucked away in a tiny and poorly lit office, I told my American interlocutor: look, I cannot begin to tell you what kind of bankruptcy law you want unless I know how you collect a debt in Russia now. My interlocutor turned to his Russian "expert;" after a brief exchange in Russian, he turned back and said: "she says they don't have any collection law now; if you need to collect a debt, you just get together a bunch of your friends and go get it."

Such was my brush with "shock therapy," the swift and painful program of transistion from socialism to a market economy imposed in Russia after the fall of communism, under the leadership of, among others, Yedor Gaidar, whose death is reported today . News stories say he died of "complications following a blood clot," but if this story sticks, then there are bound to be conspiracy theories, and I will cheerfully join them. As co-architect-in-chief of the Russian transition to capitalism in the 1990s, Gaidar certainly had plenty of enemies, high and low. Forget about tiny and poorly lit offices: just walk the streets of Moscow back in those days and see the babushkas hawking Mars bars outside the the subway stations in the snow, and you could understand that not everybody saw virtue in the program of mass privatization that Gaidar espoused. There were plenty of others, not so directly harmed, who argued at least in hindsight that Russian privatization moved to quickly, with too little attention to the creation of a legal infrastructure. Proponents of market reform stayed mostly unapologetic: you had to grasp the moment, they said; any other scheme would have become bogged down and come to naught [but for some subtle second thoughts, go here].

But like it or not, the fact remains that Russia was and remains a Wild West show, with huge rewards available to those willing to take huge risks, and where players cannot be certain that they will die quietly in their own beedr. Gaidar himself appears to have been the victim of an attempted poisoning in Ireland in 2006, just a day after a Russian dissident was poisoned in London.

Gaidar himself exercised real political power for just a brief moment at the height of the transition. Like market liberals everywhere, his program was attractive enough to win him attention in the western press, but never enough to compel any more than a rump minority of voters.

Gaidar seems to have taken the decline of his influence in stride. He continued to write and speak about Russia and the cause of market reform. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitri Medvedev uttered kind words in his memory this morning--perhaps easy enough, now that he is safely dead. It would be interesting to know how the real Putin, unbuttoned or under truth serum, thinks about the task of market reform, flawed or otherwise.

An Economist obit of Gaidar is here. DeLong has a brief personal remembrance here. "Chris" in DeLong's comments links to a postmortem on shock therapy by Gaidar himself.

Update: here's a striking personal tribute that suggests we need to seek no conspiracy theory, and that casts doubt on my suggestion that he took his decline from power "in stride" link.

The Twelve What?

The Mr. and Mrs. Buce Film Appreciation Society recently enjoyed a screening of Mel Brooks' Twelve Chairs. I first saw it about 25 years ago, the same week (I think) that I saw a Russian version of the same (by Leonid Gaidai), which does not seem to be available on Netflix (nor anyplace else that I can find). Indeed it seems there are half a dozen versions, including one from Cuba, and one in which Fred Allen plays the proprietor of a traveling flea circus.

No surprise, when you stop to think of it; the plot is classic, or inevitable: competing teams of malefactors chase after the same loot and hilarity ensues (think It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, among many others). What gives Twelve Chairs its particular durability is the opportunity it provides for extended commentary on the dashed hopes and deflated pretensions of the Soviet Union. Which brings me to a particular question: would Twelve Chairs say anything about Russia today? Or do we need a wholly new vehicle? Twelve Kalashnikovs, anybody?

Where There Is No Vision, The People Perish (And Sometimes, When There Is Vision)

Evidently there is one Republican* who yearns for the day when we will be a resource-driven kleptocracy where the old ladies sell Mars bars outside of Metro Stations (link).

And who can tell--maybe he'll get his way (thanks John).

*Self-styled. They can claim him if they want.

Been Wondering About This...

Miochael Bronner is the first guy I've noticed who responds to something I've been wondering about re Georgia and Russia (link). He forecasts

an increase in the longstanding, rampant criminality in the conflict zones that is likely to further destabilize the entire Caucasus region and at worst provide terrorist groups with the nuclear material they have long craved.

While the Russian “peacekeepers” who entrenched themselves in the conflict zones in the 1990s (and who will now likely resume their posts anew) have proved ineffectual and uninterested in maintaining stability, they’ve been highly successful in protecting an array of sophisticated criminal networks stretching from Russia through Georgian territory. South Ossetia, in particular, is a nest of organized crime. It is a marketplace for a variety of contraband, from fuel to cigarettes, wheat flour, hard drugs, weapons, people and, recently, counterfeit United States $100 bills “minted” at a press inside the conflict zone.

Sounds right to me. This has always been a refractory little corner of the world (but aren't they all?). The interesting thing is that the Moscow brass doesn't seem to care, or to notice that they may be in the same world.

Moral Clarity, Please

It's a bit unnerving to see the likes of Matt Yglesias (link, link) and TPM (link) go all squiggly giggly about Russian bullying in Georgia. Yes, the Georgians have bullied their little neighbors too (very likely, although the facts are not in, with our encouragement, and at least with our fatal lack of prudence and foresight). A moment's reflection will show that there are a zillion things the Russians could have done to help their little friends the Ossetians and the Abkhazian, had that been their purpose. But helping little friends is not high on the Russian agenda: showing the Georgians who is boss surely is on the agenda, not to mention making it clear to us who controls Caucasian oil flows. For starters, would it have been such a big deal to say, "look, there's a problem here, and our peacemakers are not the ones to solve it. Help us to put together an international force to secure community integrity of these minority peoples." Charging in with tanks and aircraft certainly makes a point, and I suspect it is almost exactly the point that the Russians wanted to make.

It is good fun, however, to see the uber-hawk Charles Krauthammer reduced to sputtering that we'd better revoke the Russian's library card.

For a fun exercise in just how complicated these things can be--or for a nice abstract wall-hanging, to occupy that bit of dead space in the dining room--check out this ethnic map of the neighborhood. Adygeys, Lezgins and Balkars remain to be heard from.